Chapter 15 #2
I carefully turned the key to unlock the drawers, then started to riffle through the files. There was nothing under M for Mulligan, D for De Lacy, or even P for Pinchon – the name Abigail De Lacy used when she remarried. I checked V for Van der Hausen as an afterthought more than a solid idea.
‘Son of a bitch,’ I exclaimed out loud as I clocked the Van der Hausen file and pulled the whole thing out.
Stuck to the front was a yellow Post-It note, its sticky edge peeling away from the paper. My mom’s precise handwriting gave me information that would have been really useful a few days ago:
henrik_l@
19_Rym62$Woe7
It was Henrik fucking Van der Hausen’s system login.
I stared at the note, not sure if I wanted to laugh or scream.
My mom had never wanted or expected me to break into the goddamn building.
She wanted me to follow the paper trail – this whole clue was about the paper trail – and hack into their system to obtain the appraisal paperwork.
The risk we’d taken to get into the auction house itself had been immense, and I had no idea if it would eventually come back to bite me.
But there was no point in stressing about it now. I was days past that problem, and I had a whole new one on my hands. I tucked the file back where it came from, along with the Post-It note so it didn’t get lost, then I went back into the shop and turned my attention to the next clue.
With the sound of New York drifting in from the street outside, I put up my feet on the desk and let the piece of card with the riddle on it rest on my knees.
She laid me down at home, in treasure’s resting place.
My outer shell wrapped in liberty, Mother’s shining face
And feet of change.
You’d think it strange, this worm’s embrace,
But what you seek is found beneath.
Where did treasure rest? I tapped my fingers against my thighs, trying to think it through. A treasure chest would be the obvious answer. Or a jewelry box.
Ha.
Was the riddle leading me back to the fucking jewelry case? It was missing, that was the point of all this. It had to be something else.
The thought of Mother’s shining face made my heart ache, but my mom wouldn’t have known what was going to happen to her when she wrote the clue.
My subconscious whispered in my ear, mother of pearl.
Hmm. It was certainly shiny. It fit.
And I’d been thinking too literally about feet of change. If I was looking for a jewelry box, it could be one that had little feet. I groaned as I realized ‘change’ didn’t mean something changing, it meant coins. Feet made of a metal they used to make coins. Gold, maybe, or copper.
I sat up to look around the shop, feeling like I was finally making progress, and my eyes landed on a collection of decorative china plates.
They were white, with designs printed on them in blue, and as I stared at them I remembered this style was called ‘Liberty Blue’, because of the depictions of old colonial buildings within the design.
All of a sudden, I knew what the clue was referring to.
I closed my eyes and searched my memory for details of the trinket box.
It was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, with a mother of pearl inlay on the top and ceramic side panels that were painted with flowers, similar to the Liberty Blue plates.
It had little gold feet and a silk lining – the worm’s embrace.
The little trinket box had come with paperwork that traced it back to the Astor family estate.
That in itself wasn’t super unusual in this city – the Gilded Age had produced several very wealthy, famous families who had accumulated a whole bunch of fine objects during their lifetimes.
Those antiques had eventually been sold off when the modern generation decided they had too many items cluttering the family estates, and they’d ended up in stores like ours.
We’d had a whole bunch of pieces come through the shop from the estates of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, and they always sold for a decent profit.
The fact that John Jacob Astor had died on the Titanic made me even more confident that I’d identified the right thing – it was another connection back to Abigail De Lacy and the Titanic.
I now knew exactly what I was looking for. And I had a terrible, sinking feeling about it.
I grabbed the shop laptop out of the drawer and pulled up our sales log, my stomach churning. If I’d made a mistake this big, I would never forgive myself. Holding my breath, I scrolled through the list of items I’d thrown together to sell to Wilson shortly after my mom had died.
The trinket box was on the list.
My heart well and truly sank.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I yelled into the empty shop.
Going to Wilson to ask for help had been one of the lowest moments in a whole series of them after my mom’s death.
All her assets had been frozen while the lawyers worked through her will, which was complicated by the police investigation.
I’d been told by our family lawyer that probate could take up to a year.
But during that time there were still bills that needed paying or the shop would have been repossessed.
Shockingly, our landlord hadn’t given a shit that a woman had died.
He’d wanted his rent payment. So I’d needed to find a way to bring in some cash, and quickly.
Although the relationship between Wilson and Walker Antiques was mostly one way – he sold us stuff that had been stolen, and we legitimized it and sold it on – Wilson would occasionally buy things.
He liked decorating his house with fine furniture and art, and he had his own network of people beyond Walker Antiques that he would source particular items for.
In that desperate moment I picked Wilson out of all my contacts as the person most likely to buy a handful of things that would allow me to make rent that month.
Out of everyone I dealt with – both legit and not – I knew Wilson wouldn’t ask too many questions, or take weeks to get back to me, and he would pay up immediately.
I’d gone around the shop throwing items I thought Wilson would like into a box, before raiding my mom’s office and the safe for a few high-class pieces that would be even more enticing – things that she hadn’t put out on display for the general public, like the trinket box.
Then I sent Wilson a message asking if he was interested in any of it.
Wilson knew my mom was dead. I’d closed the shop, and it was clear how desperate I was.
He’d summoned me not to his club, where we usually did business, but his house, forcing me to go in through the servants’ entrance at the back.
One more humiliation for me to bear as he reminded me of who was in charge.
Wilson lived in Lenox Hill, a neighborhood east of Central Park where the cheapest property still sold for several million dollars. No one would expect a serious criminal to live there, but that was the point. He blended in, accepting the veneer of respectability that the address afforded him.
When I’d offered him the box of items, Wilson had picked through them, selecting things seemingly at random. I remembered, vividly now, how he’d picked up the little trinket box and examined it carefully, then lifted the lid to see what was inside.
‘My mother likes junk like this,’ he’d said. I’d refused to take the bait. It wasn’t junk – it was a genuine antique, with links to the city’s history. He was just trying to get a rise out of me.
In the end he offered me ten grand for what he’d chosen.
It was worth more than that – three times that – but I needed the cash, and he knew it.
So I took the ten grand and said thank you, and he said he had a line on a pair of diamond earrings that I might be interested in.
Diamond earrings that I now needed to ship to Italy – another thing on my to do list, damn it.
I’d smiled and nodded and told him to call me when he picked them up.
The stupid little trinket box was now in Wilson’s house … unless he’d sold it on, which would be a whole new problem. But for now, I had to assume it was still there.
Based on the way he’d reacted last night, I didn’t think he’d be kind enough to give me the trinket box back, not until I gave him the jewelry.
But how the hell was I supposed to explain to him that I couldn’t get him the jewelry until he gave me the trinket box?
I wasn’t going to tell him about the scavenger hunt.
Hell would have to freeze over first. He didn’t deserve to know that kind of information about me and my mom – it was way too personal.
I leaned forward on the desk, pinching the bridge of my nose to push away the headache that was brewing. Which only annoyed me even more, because that never fucking worked.
Two things had become clear to me.
Number one: I had to break into Wilson’s house.
Number two: I couldn’t tell Alice. There was no way I was letting her convince me to take her along this time.